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Digital Performance Management - 4 Key Metrics to Watch

Klaus Enzenhofer

Today's websites are not just marketing channels, they are critical production factors. If a website doesn't deliver a satisfactory customer experience the entire value delivery chain breaks down, and a company will not generate revenue regardless of product quality or value proposition.

Mastering digital performance is one of the leading challenges of the web economy, and requires a joint effort between IT and the lines of business. It means measuring and managing the end-to-end transaction delivery and translating it into actionable information. This will allow you to deliver an engaging digital experience, thus maximizing revenue and improving brand loyalty.

This gets a lot easier if you simply monitor a handful of key application performance metrics. This blog describes four good ones to get started with:

1. Make sure that your online business is actually generating revenue

Cyber Monday 2014 was Walmart's biggest ever online shopping event, with mobile driving 70% of total traffic. Application performance was a major factor impacting the business results; a recent study indicates the company experienced a 2% conversion increase for every one-second improvement in response time.

It's the responsibility of both the business and engineering teams to define and achieve conversion and revenue goals, and keeping an eye on these two metrics in real time is essential.

The first set of metrics to add to your dashboard are:

■ Revenue targets

■ Conversion Rate

■ A number, or count, of money-making actions

2. Make sure that your infrastructure is available to generate revenue

There is nothing worse than your system being unavailable. This frustrates customers and often drives them to a competitor's website! Kia and Soda Stream USA struggled with this issue during Super Bowl XLVIII. To address this risk, set up an availability check for your IT systems. This is inexpensive, easily implemented and does not require much in the way of significant IT changes.

The metric to add to your dashboard is:

■ Availability from my top locations

3. Be certain that every revenue-generating customer is a happy one

You can track and understand the user's journey based on their actions. This allows you to determine what the user did with your application, how long they worked with it, which features they used and how the overall experience with your company was delivered.

The metric to add to your dashboard is:

■ User Experience Index

4. Are your business critical actions successful, erroneous or slow?

The user experience index is a great metric to provide a general overview, but there are some other revenue-generating transactions like "search", "add to cart", "check out" and "pay" that you should also be plugged into. For financial services companies, key transactions like "log-in" and "transfer funds" can be added.

The metrics to add to your dashboard are:

■ Number of executions of the critical action

■ Failure rate per critical action

■ Response time per critical action

Conclusion

It's the responsibility of both the business and engineering teams to not only define conversion and revenue goals, but also make sure they are reached. In IT you can't impact the product portfolio or how it's marketed, but you can certainly make sure application performance doesn't become a roadblock. You want to eliminate all revenue barriers, and a focus on digital performance can insure that the road to conversion is quick and easy.

Klaus Enzenhofer is a Senior Technology Strategist in the Center of Excellence at Dynatrace.

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Digital Performance Management - 4 Key Metrics to Watch

Klaus Enzenhofer

Today's websites are not just marketing channels, they are critical production factors. If a website doesn't deliver a satisfactory customer experience the entire value delivery chain breaks down, and a company will not generate revenue regardless of product quality or value proposition.

Mastering digital performance is one of the leading challenges of the web economy, and requires a joint effort between IT and the lines of business. It means measuring and managing the end-to-end transaction delivery and translating it into actionable information. This will allow you to deliver an engaging digital experience, thus maximizing revenue and improving brand loyalty.

This gets a lot easier if you simply monitor a handful of key application performance metrics. This blog describes four good ones to get started with:

1. Make sure that your online business is actually generating revenue

Cyber Monday 2014 was Walmart's biggest ever online shopping event, with mobile driving 70% of total traffic. Application performance was a major factor impacting the business results; a recent study indicates the company experienced a 2% conversion increase for every one-second improvement in response time.

It's the responsibility of both the business and engineering teams to define and achieve conversion and revenue goals, and keeping an eye on these two metrics in real time is essential.

The first set of metrics to add to your dashboard are:

■ Revenue targets

■ Conversion Rate

■ A number, or count, of money-making actions

2. Make sure that your infrastructure is available to generate revenue

There is nothing worse than your system being unavailable. This frustrates customers and often drives them to a competitor's website! Kia and Soda Stream USA struggled with this issue during Super Bowl XLVIII. To address this risk, set up an availability check for your IT systems. This is inexpensive, easily implemented and does not require much in the way of significant IT changes.

The metric to add to your dashboard is:

■ Availability from my top locations

3. Be certain that every revenue-generating customer is a happy one

You can track and understand the user's journey based on their actions. This allows you to determine what the user did with your application, how long they worked with it, which features they used and how the overall experience with your company was delivered.

The metric to add to your dashboard is:

■ User Experience Index

4. Are your business critical actions successful, erroneous or slow?

The user experience index is a great metric to provide a general overview, but there are some other revenue-generating transactions like "search", "add to cart", "check out" and "pay" that you should also be plugged into. For financial services companies, key transactions like "log-in" and "transfer funds" can be added.

The metrics to add to your dashboard are:

■ Number of executions of the critical action

■ Failure rate per critical action

■ Response time per critical action

Conclusion

It's the responsibility of both the business and engineering teams to not only define conversion and revenue goals, but also make sure they are reached. In IT you can't impact the product portfolio or how it's marketed, but you can certainly make sure application performance doesn't become a roadblock. You want to eliminate all revenue barriers, and a focus on digital performance can insure that the road to conversion is quick and easy.

Klaus Enzenhofer is a Senior Technology Strategist in the Center of Excellence at Dynatrace.

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...